Kareem Khubchandani

Core Faculty

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Biography

Kareem Khubchandani received his Ph.D. in Performance Studies from Northwestern University, and is currently the Embrey Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. At UT Austin, he has taught Feminist Research Methods, and Bodies In Motion at the undergraduate level, and will teach a graduate seminar titled Queer Nightlife. Elsewhere he has taught classes that include Bollywood Dance, Queer of Color Performance, and The Analysis and Performance of Literature.

His book project, Ishtyle: Labor, Intimacy, and Dance in Gay South Asian Nightlife complements his other writings on transgender theatre, bollywood film, performance as research, and drag. He has published in Transgender Studies Quarterly, and has essays forthcoming in Theatre Topics, Theatre Journal, The Velvet Light Trap, and The Wiley Encyclopaedia of Gender and Sexuality.

In the Summer of 2016, he will begin as Mellon Assistant Professor in the Department of Drama and Dance at Tufts University teaching at the intersections of queer studies and performance studies.

WGS 356 •
Intro To Feminist Rsch Methods

46180 •
Fall 2015
Meets
TTH 1100am-1230pm GAR 0.128

Because gender, sexuality, and the lives of marginalized peoples have historically been obscured by traditional archives/ists, colonized by traditional research practices, and condescended to by disembodied researchers, a key project of women’s and gender studies has been to develop new archives, methods of research, and a lively discussion about the responsibility of researchers to our collaborators. In this course we will ask how feminism has restructured research. This course will prepare you to formulate a research prospectus and a methodology in order to undertake an article, conference paper, undergraduate thesis, or other similar project. In the process, we will examine various feminist research methods, question their assumptions, and practice articulating our relationships, as researchers, to these methods as well as to our projects. Through readings, field trips, and panels of UT-based researchers, we will become familiar with our local university and community resources and will learn about research methods including archival research, case studies, textual analysis, oral history, ethnography, digital resources, and activist research.

WGS 393 •
Queer Nightlife

Nightclubs allow for queer intimacies and erotic enactments that breach respectable scripts of race, gender, sexuality, and class. Drugs, alcohol, music, and dance facilitate some sensory escape from regimes of heteronormativity, or in the very least, a necessary break from the drone of work. But for many—sex workers, bartenders, bouncers, drag queens—the night is also work time. Also, if we track geographies of the dancefloor, exhibitions of style, or bar décor and entertainment, we find that there are particular hierarchies of class, race, and gender functioning in spaces that we imagine as transgressive and/or inclusive. This course offers an interdisciplinary approach to the study of nightlife, asking how sexual and gender dissidence is nurtured, affirmed, disciplined, and policed, in bars, discos, house parties, cabarets, bathhouses, cinema halls, and on the street. The first part of the semester will involve readings that historicize the emergence of queer subcultures, and the establishment of gay and lesbian bars. We will also read ethnographies of more contemporary club spaces, and cultural analyses of social dance, drag performance, and DJ sets. Together these readings will ground us in a political economy of queer nightlife, and help us identify a variety of subjects and practices associated with this subculture. The second part of the semester will involve a series of workshops that build an archive of Austin’s queer nightlife: interviews with bar owners and performers; walking tours; ethnography and documentation of dance, music, style, décor; and material and digital archives. Through these workshops, we will persistently ask where transgender people, people of color, women, working class folk, HIV positive people, and immigrant subjects fit into our conception of queer nightlife. The course will culminate in a collaborative multimedia production, held in a nightclub space, where we will share with the university and Austin communities the archives of queer nightlife we have built as a class. Authors assigned include Esther Newton, Shane Vogel, Jack Halberstam, José Muñoz, Ramón Rivera-Servera, Chad Heap, Ara Wilson, Jafari Allen, E. Patrick Johnson, Marlon Bailey, Fiona Buckland, Martin Manalansan, Jeffrey McCune, Christine Hanhardt, Sam Delaney, Rochella Thorpe, Lauren Berlant, Rajinder Dudrah, George Chauncey, Richard Dyer, Alice Echols, Tim Lawrence, Ann Cvetkovich, Xavier Livermon, Sofian Merabet, Katie King, Tavia Nyong’o, and Susan Stryker.